Obambi, Meet Gresham

Gresham's Law is long and widely known in econ circles, though not mentioned often enough among the punditocracy. Obambi faces it now, and once again, he's blinked (as of the time I'm typing).

In essence, in the absence of symmetric true information, bad goods drive out good goods (hard to say, and it's not just coinage). There was a reason that the scam health insurance policies, almost all aimed at uninsured individuals, weren't grandfathered into the AHA: stupid poor-ish people are easily duped into buying same. They look only at the monthly premium, not at the expected value vs. the premium. Such policies will drive those most in need of real insurance into faux insurance.

As I type, the news states only existing (and those canceled, allegedly, due to AHA) policies will be allowed to continue. New buying is not permitted. We'll see the Right Wingnuts crying: "let the market decide!!!" once again. As if health is a market good. Ayn Rand would be proud.

RIP, Bob

Bob's dad died.

You might remember Bob, that yakking paperclip that was supposed to make Windows easier to use? His pop was Clifford Nass, and the creation of Bob should be enough to ignore his passing. I mean Bob???

On the other hand, according to the recitation in the Times obit, his principle occupation was at Stanford, and he had, at best, a gingerly view of human/computer interaction.

I mean, who wouldn't applaud this:

Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor whose pioneering research into how humans interact with technology found that the increasingly screen-saturated, multitasking modern world was not nurturing the ability to concentrate, analyze or feel empathy

While the obit doesn't include a cite, I expect he'd agree with the legendary studies which showed that GUI-fied applications, Word in particular, distract users from content to focus on the easy facade. Playing is always more fun than working, so it's not surprising to discover that Word users would expend more time and energy on font selection than on more mind taxing content.

Nass' research centered on the effects of multi-tasking. Again, I'm a member of the choir.

"We all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something," he said in an interview with the PBS program "Frontline." "We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another."

...

"We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly."

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Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Is it any wonder that some of us question the au courant meme of Agile, for example? Read Nick Carr in memorium.

Kumite', Again

Anthony Bourdain is among the most interesting of reality show personalities. He's now on his third show, and third network: "Parts Unknown" on CNN, Sunday at 9 PM. (As with his previous shows, the title is both metaphor and allusion: he goes to places tourists seldom do, and indulges in eating animal bits that suburban Americans wouldn't, and likely don't even know about.) Somehow, I missed last week's episode, but I saw a promo for it, in which he talks about doing the episode. It's even edgier than usual. Which is more than usual for basic cable.

The episode is Tokyo, but not the touristy parts. It repeats again Sunday, the 10th, at 8 PM. You should see it. This Tokyo is disturbing.

Well, it's Tokyo and Tony visits with a sushi chef he'd known for years in New York, Yasuda. At about 20 minutes into the piece, we see that Yasuda has been practicing karate for some years, and we see a few minutes of footage from the dojo he uses in Tokyo. An earlier missive in this endeavor made metaphor of karate and kumite'; not all practitioners have the skill and discipline to fight as they practice. There's some kumite' on display, and some, but not all, of the roundhouse kicks are by the book.

We find that Yasuda does, both in kumite' and sushi.

Yasuda, not too surprisingly, is a stickler for doing sushi the right way. His knuckles remind me rather a bit of George's.

The Human Pretzel Factory

Never been a big fan of Agile, which should come as no surprise, since any relationalist subscribes to the notion that one needs first decide on the nature of persistent data. There are lots of tools for schema migration these days, so don't give me any shit about that. Changing schema is no more difficult than changing code. And, lest we forget, an Organic Normal Form™ schema is the constraints of record, and thus can be used to generate client side code. Lots of folks use xml monsters to do just that.

So, I came across this piece, via Artima. There's a link to the prequel in the piece.

As he concludes, there is no silver bullet. Well, there is, it just isn't some codified process. Carpenters live by it: "measure twice, cut once". The whole agile thing asserted that it isn't possible to understand an application a priori, so don't bother and just code sling until the cows come home. Eventually, if you don't wear out your debugger in the process, you'll get something to work. It should come as no surprise that healthcare.gov got built this way. Here's the autopsy. For the record: the previous sentence's contents, I just discovered, while the one next previous I just winged it: seemed obvious given the Kiddie Koders who've been the public facing talking heads.

Measure twice, cut once. Repeat until you understand that.

Frankly My Dear, I Don't Give a Damn

Let's, for the moment, assume that Obamacare works much as it was designed: provide affordable healthcare. Next, let's follow Einstein's lead and conduct a thought experiment. He devised the notion, although not the algebra, for the theory of special relativity whilst sitting on a tram looking at a receding clock tower. He imagined that, were the tram moving fast enough, the clock would look to him, on the tram, to have stopped. And the rest is history and a Nobel. The proceeds went to his estranged wife, whom he didn't like all that much. Oddly, still more: she did most of the algebra underpinning special relativity. Albert was a bit of an ingrate. Didn't believe in quantum theory, either.

What, then, can we imagine would stop if Obamacare works as designed?

Mostly, bad marriages. Very Einstein, don't you think? And why would one come to such a conclusion? It's been well documented that having access to healthcare is a powerful force, keeping otherwise disgruntled people in bad marriages and bad jobs. House ownership, too. But Obamacare doesn't deal with that. Yet anyway.

So, we should see an increase in divorces. Whether that increase will be above sampling noise, is another issue. But unintended consequences have a habit of occurring. Just ask Greenspan; he crashed interest rates without much of a clue what would ensue.

Bookmark this post, and come back in five years. If the globe hasn't exploded, of course. Never know what the Jews and Arabs might do.

Pretty Boy Floyd

Floyd Norris' column this Saturday was unusual, in that there was no cite to the QWERTY Analytics (or some such), just his byline, NYT, and BLS data. Let's see.

Start with the title:

Changes in Labor Force Mask Gains in the Jobs Situation

With such a title, one would rationally expect that he's going to present data which contradicts both the Left Wing and Right Wing Nuts, who point to the continuing drop in the size of the labour force as the main reason the stated unemployment rate has fallen. The lack of progress by Obambi is something both camps agree on. They disagree as to why, of course. The Left asserts that the Tea Party House (and the Senate, but less egregiously) eviscerated the stimulus effort; they got to spike the recovery and shift the blame to Obambi. The Right disclaims any responsibility for watering down the stimulus, claiming it wouldn't work at any amount of money; the key is to get all those welfare cheats back to work at starvation wages, and then all will be well.

The record is clear: the Right did spike the stimulus. What might have happened with either a more focused stimulus, or none at all can't be known now. We do have much historical data to demonstrate that robust stimulus works. It's called World War II. It would be helpful to get the stimulus effect without all the dead bodies and razed cities, of course.

So, he continues:

But the actual employment picture may be better than those statistics would indicate. Over the last few years, the labor force has changed in important ways because of demographics.

The accompanying charts attempt to adjust for those changes. They do not show a strong recovery, but they do indicate that the overall employment situation has improved.

One might reasonably infer from this that, despite a drop in the size of the measured labour force (usually referenced as the Labour Force Participation Rate, rather the count), unemployment has really gone down, i.e. employment has really gone up. Let's see.

The makeup of the working age population has changed substantially in only a few years. When the recession began at the end of 2007, 54 percent of the people considered to be working age were in the prime working age range of 25 to 54. Now, the figure is 51 percent. The proportion over 55 went to 34 percent, from 30 percent. With more people at or over traditional retirement age, it should be no surprise that fewer are working.

While I don't have a cite immediately to hand, data since The Great Recession began have measured an *increase* of older workers working past the "average" retirement age of the years previously. In other words, to the extent that older workers make up the demographic, there is data indicating that they've not gone off to the Life of Riley Hammock, sipping gin. And if we look at the linked graphs, we see that old folks continued to work. If you examine the middle cohort, in middle dense blue, you can see that the unemployment rate and participation rate track exactly in The Great Recession period, lending credence to both the Left and Right that things ain't all that much better.

In sum: the oldest cohort has stuck to the labour force in greater numbers than in the past, from which those with rose colored glasses conclude that the unemployment situation is getting better, overall. For those not so festooned, the middle cohort has, even with Norris' "adjusted" numbers taken it the gut. The youngest cohort, worse still.

As I read the data, the oldest cohort retains due to coercion, not choice. Their positive effect on overall employment status isn't really a positive: they can't afford to retire and leave their jobs to younger folks. This is not progress. Note that the Right Wing Nuts constantly bray about forcing the old farts to work until 70 or 75; after all in 1935, 65 was the average life expectancy so we should obviously raise today's retirement age to average life expectancy. Makes sense to me.

First Thing We Do Is, Kill All the Biostats

Sequenom is a diagnostic/testing company that devised a way to test for Down syndrome non-invasively. They've been in a patent fight over their tests for some time. Today's Times has some details. What's both interesting, and perhaps disturbing, about the case is exemplified in some contradictory text in the article.

On the one hand,

The new tests offered by Sequenom and several competitors take advantage of the fact that some DNA from the fetus can be found in a pregnant woman's blood and can be analyzed with new genetic techniques.

Note the "new genetic techniques". But later on

In her ruling, Judge Illston said that the presence of the DNA in the pregnant woman's blood was a novel discovery but could not be patented because it was a natural phenomenon. And claims in the patent over how to detect that DNA were not eligible for a patent because they involved conventional genetic techniques.

So, we have it both ways. At least in this write-up.

But more to the point, as quoted in the article

"It's hard to imagine patents on diagnostics surviving if that approach is taken," Christopher M. Holman, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said of Wednesday's ruling.

And, that I would agree. All those biostats out on the sidewalk, destitute, having to hit the dusty trail to New York to work as a financial quant. One question: how large a part of quants generally are the biostats? This piece from a few years ago says, about 1/3, if the data have the biostats counted with the general stats, 1/4 if they're really disjoint. And half of the remaining 2/3 work in the vampire squid colony in lower Manhattan.

While I'm by no means a fan of software patents, and most bio patents, in the latter a case can be made that such diagnostics/tests can be novel physical inventions, and thus meet the criteria for patenting as set down by The Founding Fathers. Unlike Myriad, in my opinion, what Sequenom has is different from attempting to patent the "natural phenomenon". One of the arguments against a patent is the notion of obviousness to a competent practitioner. Where that exists in statute, I can't find, but is repeated endlessly. Let's suppose that it is really in law. Then, in the case of medical diagnostics (and the jobs of all those poor biostats), the issue is obviousness in how the "conventional genetic techniques" (if truly "conventional") were structured. Ultimately, all new genetic techniques derive from conventional techniques, at some arm's length. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that. By this logic, no patent on a VOM could be awarded, since, after all, electrical current/resistance/voltage are all natural phenomena and lots of conventional meters existed. If Apple can get a patent for a rectangle with rounded corners...